A sense of urgency is needed to pull South Africa’s mining industry back from the brink and set it on a course to success, and for the industry to be scathing about condemning its evil past in the strongest of terms.

The country has fallen badly behind other mining jurisdictions and the strong leadership that President Cyril Ramaphosa is able to provide can quickly set the industry back on the correct course.

He is a President who has come out of the industry and knows how to negotiate to set us back on the right road.

The Chamber of Mines of South Africa has been beavering behind the scenes to be able to get out of the starting blocks quickly if negative turns to positive, which has now happened.

All South Africans need to grab the great opportunity that the new leadership is presenting and treat it as a once-in-lifetime chance to set things right.

As Herbert Smith Freehills partner and Africa cochairperson Peter Leon said in his address to the British Chamber of Business last week, the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act has failed to prescribe objective guidelines and proper timelines for the exercise of licensing powers by either the Minister of Mineral Resources or the Department of Mineral Resources, which leaves too much to their interpretation and discretion.

Excess discretion has, in turn, led to an ongoing environment of inconsistency as much as regulatory uncertainty, which reached a negative peak under the shocking Mining Charter III, created unilaterally by Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane, who faces potential arrest for alleged misappropriation of R30-million prior to his appointment by former President Jacob Zuma.

As a result, investor confidence needs urgently to be restored.

A starting point must be the strongest possible condemnation of past mining practice and a pledge to set things right.

As Leon points out, as early as 1913, African National Congress founder and journalist Sol Plaatje wrote about the “two hundred thousand subterranean heroes who, by day and by night, for a mere pittance lay down their lives to the familiar ‘fall of rock’ and who, at deep levels, in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust”.

Added to that was the wicked migrant labour system, the horrific Mozambique Convention and enforced hostel dwelling away from families and loved ones.

The foul legacy of the scandalous hostel system still haunts South Africa, and Portugal should be made to repay Mozambique for what amounted to enslavement of Mozambicans and the accumulation of ill-gotten gold in the vaults of Lisbon by paying workers in weak local currency and demanding payment for their hard labour in gold in the Portuguese capital.

All this should be condemned at the highest level by mining companies, with the lead in all this taken by the Chamber of Mines.